Paid Subscribers Are About to Get Some $OG

The official logo of Off-Grid ($OG), the official token of Our Uncertain Future, off-grid life and the nascent Hummingbird Project.

Big moves have been happening around the high desert homestead the past month. Not long ago, I wrote for Forbes about how we scored a couple new patches of sage and dirt in the neighborhood for dirt cheap.

But I didn’t share all my thoughts or the whole story over there. I saved the juiciest bits for Our Uncertain Future.

The TL;DR of the Forbes piece is that we snagged an empty off-grid lot a short distance from our home in the same community for under $1,000. We don’t have concrete plans for the plot. The smart and economical thing would be to throw up a yurt and outhouse as quickly and cheaply as possible, take some glamour shots of the epic view and market it as an Instagrammable romantic off-grid desert adventure for $200 a night for all the urban refugees. This is a shocking and disturbingly successful grift approach throughout beautiful parts of the rural American West.

While I normally endorse smart and economical moves, tossing up yet another bougie, overpriced Airbnb is not only not exactly what our community needs right now, it’s also just the most boring plan of action I can think of. And I do not have time for boring.

That’s why, instead, we’re going to experiment with creating a place that can be of service to the community we’re hoping to create here on Our Uncertain Future — namely our friends, family, and friends and family we’ve yet to meet and other kindred spirits excited about living independently, in community, in nature, or in a new, improved and more decentralized world.

Decentralization: Applying the Off-Grid Approach to Everything

So what the hell does that run-on sentence mean and how will it all take shape? Johanna and I have some ideas (how’d you like to be entitled to a stay at an educational off-grid retreat, or coveted online and in-person animism or nature writing workshops in the high desert?), but we’re open to feedback and we want input from the community to be part of the process. And since I’m a regenerative crypto nerd who spends my indoor hours deep in the bowels of the blockchain world, we’re already experimenting with putting this process onchain. Why? Because it’s more based than boring.

Basically, we’ll be using a bespoke digital token called the Off-Grid token (or $OG) as a way to recognize and reward involvement in the community and in helping us think through the future of the piece of land we’ve recently acquired, which we’re calling “The Hummingbird Project.”

The land is empty, but the view is... not.

Think of $OG 0.00%↑as a combination of participating in a co-op and a points or rewards program like some credit cards offer.

Holding the token entitles you to cast votes on decisions involving the Project that we will be turning to the community for input on, as well as perks to be determined in the future like the aforementioned workshops. It’s also, appropriately, your ticket to introductory Zoom workshops on crypto, decentralized tech and systems and what they mean for living off-grid and our uncertain future (the reality, not the Substack).

You can earn $OG a number of ways:

1. Being a paid subscriber to Our Uncertain Future entitles you to a digital bag you can claim. Expect an email soon with a claim link that will allow you to move a special amount of OG 0.00%↑ into your self-custody digital wallet, like MetaMask, Rainbow or Coinbase Wallet. If you don’t have a self-custody crypto wallet, you can click through to set one up through Coinbase. I’m also happy to help you set up with a MetaMask wallet (my day job is working for Consensys, the company behind MetaMask.)

2. Referring new paid subscribers to OUF.

3. Contributing to the community in other ways like Off-Grid OG Gary Feuerman did here.

4. You can even buy OG 0.00%↑here if you already speak crypto fluently. Keep in mind, OUF doesn’t actually control the OG token, the trading pools or exchanges where you can buy it. (We asked an AI bot to create it for us last year and then invested in a big chunk, part of which we’ll be distributing to the community.)

I know this will sound completely indiscernible to many of you. Please shoot any questions at me. Happy to teach as much as I know. Also feel free to ignore all the token stuff and just continue to enjoy the words and images here like normal. Happy to have you either way, but excited to start building both digitally and in more tangible ways.